For those unfamiliar with speech recognition technology, the last step just noted isn’t a joke. Before achieving acceptable accuracy, at least until recently all but the highest-end programs have had to get acclimated to your voice, requiring users to spend time reading “See Spot run” exercises before beginning live use. Although an Apple tech support representative told me that the company has not released any estimates about the accuracy of Mountain Lion’s dictation, what I have experienced thus far with absolutely no set-up is at least 95% — and Apple says “The more you use it, the better it understands you.”

To the extent I could verify them (in English only), the claims Apple makes on its information page about dictation appear to be accurate. One reviewer has panned its roughly 30-second limitation on a single dictation stream. Given the ability to almost instantly pause and resume with the Function key, I don’t see how that’s really a valid complaint.

So how did Apple do this? The “secret” is that the computer which is interpreting and then rendering your speech isn’t yours. It’s Apple’s, reached through Director Al Gore’s “invention” (i.e., the Internet, for those who don’t remember the 2000 presidential campaign). This means that the company can throw all the processing power required to make its recognition capabilities robust, while still giving users with Macs that are even four or five years old the ability to join in the fun.

As I see it, if you don’t have a Mac running Mountain Lion, your computer is seriously out of date.

The company which Steve Jobs built, left involuntarily, returned to save and then transformed has just opened the door to productivity-increasing, life-enhancing, and economy-improving possibilities one can only begin to imagine — and yes, Apple, while improving on the accumulated technology of predecessor efforts which were never able to make what they had into something the average person can and will use, including on their iPads and soon their iPhones, is the company which built it. Too many big-government advocates who should be thanking God every day for private-industry breakthroughs such as these, including our incumbent President, instead act as if they deserve the credit because many of Apple’s employees commute to and from work every day on government roads and transit systems. Give me a break.

Along with having a decades-long career in accounting, finance, training and development, Tom Blumer has written for several national online publications primarily on business, economics, politics and media bias. He has had his own blog, BizzyBlog.com, since 2005, and has been a PJM contributor since 2008.

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1.
Betina

“Back then, Arthur Young, where I worked, was the only one of the then-Big Eight CPA firms using Macs for anything meaningful -” As an accountant I can tell you, unequivocally, that Quick Books on a MAC sucks on stilts. Don’t know what programs you have been using but your statement sure runs counter to my experience and those of many others I know.

AY was using Macs as primarily as an audit documentation tool in the mid-1980s.

There are certain holes in the software lineup available for Macs, and accounting software has long been one of them — to the point where some Mac users end up owning Parallels so they can get the Windows versions.

“So how did Apple do this? The “secret” is that the computer which is interpreting and then rendering your speech isn’t yours. It’s Apple’s, reached through Director Al Gore’s ‘invention’” …. hmmmm… given Apple’s history, what’s the fine print on the user’s agreement? Will Apple be claiming ownership of my dictated documents?

And how would security on something like this work? Color me paranoid…

Back then, Dupont’s research centers were early adopters. They were ideal machines for researchers, like myself. The machines were so good that I’m still using a 1995 Power Mac 8500 for some laboratory processes,and on occasion, I still fire up my 1989 Mac IIci. The things just run. While the 25mhz IIci is noticeably slow, the 150mhz 8500 can still do a credible job with Excel, a CAD program, and Photoshop.

“Too many big-government advocates who should be thanking God every day for private-industry breakthroughs such as these, including our incumbent President, instead act as if they deserve the credit because many of Apple’s employees commute to and from work every day on government roads and transit systems. Give me a break.”

Seems like we all need a break from this president. I don’t really understand how a public road was the reason for Apple’s success (according to Obama), but, hey, then again I’m not a liberal Democrat (thank God). I just don’t know how people like Obama and Elisabeth Warren say things like this with a straight face? Unless they honestly and truly believe it. And THAT thought really, really, scares me. If we have people that high in power who really believe that much in socialism and Marxism, then Senator Joe McCarthy was right all along. We did and still do have a serious problem in our government. I wonder what McCarthy, let alone someone like J. Edgar Hoover, would say about Obama today? I cringe when I think about it. Wow, do we need a change in November.

Farmers tend, in rural communities, make the point that those who are critical of of farmers ought to never complain with a full mouth. Teachers meanwhile like to think that if you can read, thank a teacher. Military vets like to claim that the reason you breathe free air is solely due to them. And so on.

Farmers in this era don’t grow the food they do without the help of geneticists to create optimal yield varieties, engineers to design and build the equipment they use to till the fields, workers in the oil fields obtaining the raw material needed to fuel the equipment, and so on. If farmers weren’t reliant on this vast interconnected web, they’d be poking the ground with sticks the way things used to be in 1240AD and barely growing enough to feed themselves, much less anyone else.

The only real difference between Dem and Rep these days is that Dems don’t get technology and want to tax and regulate it; meanwhile Reps work to make tech ubiquitous via thwarting Dem tax and regulation and using government to invest into tech use. This is the only valid thing the Rep side has going for it. Vote Dem if you want to kill the economy; vote Rep if you don’t.

But insofar as recognition that society is interconnected, it’s only far right pinheads who try to claim otherwise (i.e. the same pinheads who think the only reason anyone breathes free air is due to them having served a tour in Iraq.)

I remember as a kid in the 70s my Dad used a dictation machine. He’d speak into a handset and announce all the punctuation as he went along. His secretary would then play it back and transcribe it using a typewriter.

In the 1990′s Mac’s hardware and software was incredibly expensive and proprietary. Because they ran stuff mostly in RAM they were great for graphic arts and similar applications. In the business world at the time most used IBM type machines for good reasons.

The speech recognition software sounds great, but like other commenters, I hesitate to dictate my documents into Apple’s “cloud”. Their corporate culture is far too similar to the federal gubmint’s for my taste.

Sugars is an attempt to use dictation. So this is an attempt to use dictation. You know this isn’t too bad it had a little trouble with the words so this the first time but it seems to a car on the second. I wonder if it knows about punctuation. It didn’t use the right words, almost every time, in the third sentence. It turned did into didn’t however. Still I can imagine this might be easier than typing some things as long as you go back and copyedit later.

The Weakness of Mountain Lion is relying on internet connections to pass data back and forth. Latency, power outages, people uncomfortable with passing data to Apple, are not inconsiderable barriers.

I am negative on the Cloud concept. Because as we get “greener” and more eco-friendly, we get more Indian style power grids and less of a First World. Look at Japan last summer — rolling blackouts the norm.

When we get more Indian style grids. India went down this week hard. The problem with Macs is the hardware. You have to use Apple parts for almost any repairs or upgrades. They are very expensive. People will spend thousands of dollars on a Mac and compare it to a $300.00 HP at Best Buy. There are great systems on the Windows side, if you spend two or three thousand dollars.

But there’s nothing new here. My Android smartphone can do the same thing, just as well, and it does it the same way – send it to the cloud for the heavy number crunching. Only in this case, it’s Google that does the crunching. And we all know how Google is dedicated to privacy for its users, right? Right.

Thanks, but no, thanks.

I’ll stick with my Dragon Naturally Speaking. I really didn’t mind the 5 minutes or so I spend training it, and out of the box I get better than 90% accuracy without sending my information out to who-knows-where.

So you like the new Mountain Lion OS, congratulations. A private company invented something? That happens thousands of times every day. Who ever said nothing good comes out of private industry (or academia or government)? No one says that. Look at the research our universities do or the military might that our government is responsible for. Private industry is important, so are the other parts of our society. That government is too big is a question worth debating. That government has no proper role is not such a question.

“government roads and transit systems”?
Who paid for those “government” roads and transit systems?

Brutus: That Jobs guy was really lucky. He was smart, somebody else, such as the Harvard Law Review editor-in-chief who had never written a single law review paper was smarter. Jobs worked hard, the really really brlliant one worked really really harder to find a way to claim credit. Jobs didn’t build Apple, somebody else made that happen.

Oh, that Al Gore guy is Apple’s insurance policy to provide protection against the pitch forks wielding 99% whose sights are on Apple’s billions of somebody else’s money. If Apple had paid its fair share, then Solyndra’s stimulus could be bigger, and would not have to close before Nov. And GM could build more villages to house “our” unsold Volts.

Am I the only one that actually likes the way Windows 7 does dictation. Learning the nuances of a particular users voice helps in the long run. I find far fewer mistakes than using Mountain Lion or Siri on the mobile devices.

I’m rather enjoying getting back into Mac OS X development after a hiatus. But every time there’s a new system version, I have to learn several hundred new API calls. It’s exhausting. It is almost miraculous, however, how rapidly one can put together a fully-featured GUI application. And one thing that tends to get overlooked by most run-of-the-mill users is that underneath, OS X is UNIX (specifically, from Snow Leopard on it is UNIX 03 compliant). That is a huge win for people like me. A lot of its underlying robustness and efficiency derives from that fact.

Bloggers, columnists et al. are awfully lucky that someone’s allowed ‘em access to their sites to publish their silly tantrums.

A President that’s built nothing himself finds it easy to say that no one’s built anything themselves: presumably, he includes his predecessor & his likely election opponent among ‘em. IOW, this is not a topic of debate for those that have staff, handlers, fellow travelers, & entourages; including the late Steve Jobs.